SAP - AcuitiLabs

Category: SAP

Looking for a Debt Management Solution? How SAP is the right choice?

Are you looking for a debt management solution? ‘Bad Debt’ is a term used by organisations when the user or customers do not or cannot pay their bills. It is difficult to ignore the fact that with the current economic slowdown and rising unemployment, household incomes around the world have seen a downfall, increasing the possibility of delinquency and an upsurge in bad debt charges. The ambiguities arising from global shocks such as Brexit, trade wars, and a possible recession also pose risks for utilities & similar organisations. At the same time, liberalization and intensifying competition in many markets are resulting in higher levels of switching among customers, sometimes accompanied by bad debt when final bills are not paid.

In liberalized retail markets, utilities bear full responsibility for debt collection, but their manoeuvring room in recovering the bad debt is limited by regulatory and political constraints. The focus on maintaining the best customer experience, together with service obligations and provisions such as long grace periods, protection for vulnerable groups, and winter moratoriums, makes it difficult to suspend the service even as a last resort. Public opinion and political pressure act as a further deterrent, and utility companies need to reconfirm to the public time and again that their processes are fully compliant and adhere to the highest professional standards when it comes to debt collections.

Loss of income is becoming a burden on businesses and inhibiting growth, and the situation shows no signs of improving. Sectors like Utilities, Telecom can ill afford to ignore such waste and eliminating it can generate resources to invest in future growth. In a tight economic and regulatory context, utilities need to work harder to prevent and manage bad debt if they want to stay competitive and improve their resilience. Experience shows that companies are better at weathering downturns if they have already cleaned up their credit processes and minimized overdue debt because they are able to move fast to cut costs, protect profitability, and reserve growth capacity. Thus utilities will have to take matters into their own hands. By reshaping their credit and collections processes, they can improve their ability to predict risk, reduce bad-debt charges by, and provide a better experience for customers.

Barriers & Opportunities

Data Analytics & Customer Engagement

Data Analytics isn’t all new for organisations with large customer base like Utilities, Telecom – it’s actually been around for quite some time. there are numerous utilities using – basic behavioural scoring. Analytics is a continuous improvement process to identify ever changing customer behaviour and other collections related trend. Best-practice collections strategies should use emerging trends to segment customers, targeted collection campaigns & quick adjustments to the treatment path.

Continuously improving process requires the ability to monitor the effectiveness of the strategies, performance of customer segment & other relevant KPIs. In addition, advanced data analysis using metrics and trend displays, and collection control dashboards that illustrate KPIs such as status of overdue receivables and corresponding collections actions, will provide the necessary business intelligence to adapt and extend collections activities.

Various trends where Analytics can support Debt Management –

Reactive Collection vs Proactive Measures
Customer Segmentation: Can’t pay, won’t pay….forgot to pay
Customer Behaviour: Payment pattern, preferred mode of payment, initiative customer reacts to
Predictive Analysis
Identifying right strategy, right action for customer
Insight for the next strategy iteration

SAP Analytics Cloud is one simple cloud solution connecting your people, information, and ideas to enable fast and confident decision making. Machine learning technology and embedded artificial intelligence help you to discover deep insights, simplify access to critical information, and empower informed decision making for all.

Developed for real-time BI, planning and predictive analytics that natively integrates to SAP, the solution can predict when proactive action is required, something typically difficult for companies to do. The accelerated value is in enhancing organization’s ability to collect cash and improving its insight into profitability indicators. It also leverages SAC content to seamlessly integrate with SAP data and SAP S/4HANA^®. Advanced predictive analytics becomes the quiet driver behind dynamic operational, tactical and strategic dashboards that have been designed with SAP Fiori for a uniform and modern user experience.

Removing system Barrier

There is a basic understanding in industries like Utility, Telecom on the concepts of collections best practices, but almost all organisation lack the technology to be able to adopt best practices. Traditionally, collections have been the technology domain of the Organisation’s customer information system (CIS). Many companies struggle with weak and restrictive collections functionality in an aging CIS. Others may have a relatively new CIS in place that boasts adequate collections support but is missing key features to support today’s best-practice collections processes.

Collection managers, dependent upon the CIS platform & team to manage collections processes to implement improved collection processes. Debt is not going away. There will always be customers who default on payment. But technology has caught up with the problem, and companies now have the option to implement specialist collection software products that enable best-practice approaches.

Some of the best practices followed across the globe are –

Rapid change cycles executed by domain experts: Analyse, Optimize, Implement
Strategy changes no more an IT change request
Scalable & Flexible when it comes to including new changes/attributes that are based on analytical trends
Design transparency, improved performance & integration with 3^rd party DCAs
Offers tailored treatment based on customer segmentation
Allows Champion – Challenger strategy and success valuation

SAP BRIM – Financial Customer Care with Debt Management using BRF+

Business Rule Framework plus (BRFplus) provides a comprehensive application programming interface (API) and user interface (UI) for defining and processing business rules. It allows you to model rules in an intuitive way and to reuse these rules in different applications.

Flexibility in changing Business rules in Collection process enables Revenue Management team to –

Make their collections rules progressively more targeted, as they become more and more sophisticated with their analytics and customer segmentation
Add more sophisticated customer characteristics (e.g. components of credit risk scores, payment behaviour) as the data becomes more readily available
Adapt their rules to changing macro-economic conditions (e.g. recessions, political climates, etc) or changing customer behaviours (e.g. greater mobile use, email use)
Respond rapidly to unforeseen events

Leveraging BRF+ features to improve Debt Management

Scenario 1: Business running on SAP with Debt Management using legacy Dunning procedure

Debt Management using SAP’s Legacy Dunning Procedure was limited to few attributes like

Days in Arrear
Amount of Debt
Creditworthiness score

Combinations of these parameters were used to define levels and activities where defined as per Business need.

Debt Management with BRF+ is robust, scalable, and way ahead in its offering compared to its predecessor. It is a framework of Business rules which can use a wide range of attributes to determine the correct path for a customer.

Master Data
Transactional data
Derived values using formula e.g. oldest item, energy/non-energy debt
Function Module (data from external system/other modules/calculation of attributes not possible through formula)

Advantage of moving to Debt Management using BRF+

No additional licenses required
Whole loads of attributes to define strategy
Simplifies the process of identifying the right collection path, sequence for a customer based on changing payment behaviors, credit history, Debt parameter, etc.
Web based UI enabling Business User to control the strategy changes
Supports multiple strategies and at run time identifies the strategy or path to be executed on a customer
Supports Champion Challenger concept and reports on Success valuation of the strategies

Scenario 2: Business running on SAP but Collection strategy on 3^rd Party Solutions

Because of limited functionalities offered by the Dunning procedure, many companies moved their Debt Management solution to other 3^rd parties offerings. SAP too understood the need of the Businesses and introduced BRF+ for managing Debt. This has been a game changer for various organisations especially in the utilities, telecom sector who had no option but to move to 3^rd party offerings.

SAP may lag on jazzy screens compared to the 3^rd party solutions but on functionality offerings, it’s no less. GUI look and feel also now has been taken care through FIORI.

The real value what Business gets using SAP Debt Management using BRF+ are

Simulation in system before actual batch run controlling unforeseen scenarios
No additional license cost
Huge saving on TCO as the solution is in the same SAP system.
- Transactional
- Data Storage
- Annual Maintenance
No hassle of managing multiple real time interfaces to keep data up to date in the Debt management system
Improved Customer Service and savings on AVHT as Business User will have to refer to only one system for all the customer relevant information

What comes along with BRF+

BRF+ is like a container for the complete business rules and provides out of box integration with various other processes along with Debt Management. Power of BRF+ can be leveraged in

Billing and Revenue Innovation Management

Product
Discount/Charge Activation
Charge Plan Activation
Charge Plan Parameter Value Determination

Sales and Distribution

Output Determination

Revenue Account Reporting

Integration with Source System (SD, Hybris Billing, CRM, etc.)
Account Determination (POB Attributes, Contract Asset, Contract Liability, Recognized revenue, Deferred Cost)

Industry Solution – Utilities

Advanced Metering Infrastructure Event Management

Why Choose Acuiti Labs for your Debt Management Transformation?

Acuiti Labs is an SAP Silver partner and a digital firm that delivers business and technology consulting services, transforming businesses with pioneering and latest solutions. We have proven expertise in delivering successful SAP BRIM based transformation, thus offering complete support for your Business objective on Debt management.

When it comes to Debt Management transformation, we have collaborated with several clients across industries like Utilities, Telcom, Postal, Port and supported them in containing their Debt position not only by technology implementation but also by offering Industry best practices.

Our professional SAP experts have Big 4 consulting experience and strong technology capability in the area of SAP BRIM, Analytics, AI, Big Data, Mobile & other Cloud technology. We are best placed to understand your Business objective and co-create the required solution.

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25 SepSAP

BRIM Dispute, Dunning and Collection Management. Role of Acuiti Labs

What is SAP BRIM?

SAP BRIM, also commonly known SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management is nothing but a high-volume usage-based solution that’s sole purpose is to ease complex billing and invoicing processes and simplify the entire process for the businesses. It improves the flow of selling and re-selling of products and services and sharing revenue in the most appropriate way.

SAP BRIM for Dunning and Collection Management – Process Overview

Here are the few steps that can help you in understanding the complete process of SAP BRIM –

1. Define Service Products and Bundles: During the first step, along with defining the product, product relationships such as cross-and up-sell is also identified. Then further comes bundling of any services & products followed by a configuration process based on the requirement of the customers. There can also be Reuse of rate plans for different products

2. Contract Creation and Management: Next in the process comes the contract creation part where order decomposition and Contract lifecycle management in initiated.

3. Mediation and Rating: The third step in the process is responsible for managing high volume, real-time and batch mediation and rating. All the metering, balance management and splitting of debits and/or credits are carried out in this step of the SAP BRIM Process.

4. Billing and Invoicing: Not only simple but also in a very effective manner the summarization is done, special attention is given so that there is no loss of detail. Required Billing and Payment Statement support, Reverse-and-rerate process support is provided during this step.

5. Accounts and Receivable: This is the final step of the process and here the receivables management dunning & collections payment handling is done. Line-item Dispute Management Credit Management is also part of this final step.

What is Dunning and Collection Management? How can SAP be the best choice?

Using SAP BRIM for Dunning and collection Management – Dunning is the process of methodically communicating with customers to ensure the collection of receivables

During this process notices are sent to the customer with overdue items, requesting payment of the outstanding amount by a specified date

SAP BRIM leverage the concept of the Business Rules framework to identify the appropriate collection step (action) as per the latest parameters of the customer account.

Features of using SAP BRIM for Dunning and Collection Management

Dunning –

Configure multiple collection step for the Collection Strategy.
Tailored treatment for different segments of the customer
Running Champion-Challenger – Multiple strategies running in parallel
Success Valuation of each strategy, each action for continuous refinement of strategies
Dunning history and traceability of all actions to overdue items
Automatic interest/charge calculation & posting in the run
Customer-specific activities based on pre-defined function modules like integration with 3rd party debt collection agencies
Mass reversal of dunning runs including dunning activities
Simulation in production before any major in the strategy being deployed

Collection Management –

Significant way to reduce the time spent in collections from customers.

By using collection management software it becomes easy for the organizations and the individual to manage, control, and align the entire collection flow. Buying and spending a lot on software like CRM or ERP for bringing in more leads and get those closed quickly is fine but not on the cost of ignoring the remaining part of the process. Rest of the process that comes after the contract has been signed or the product has been delivered, where to close the loop you have to collect the money that is owed to you.

The process of collecting the money isn’t as easy at it seems and requires a lot of time and efforts. Opting for a collection management software to streamline this process has turned to be really beneficial and time saving by a lot of businesses today.

Here are a few benefits that a lot of companies have already realized by using collection management software –

Faster Payments – The organizations that are already using collection management software receives the payment 20% faster when compared to the organizations that are still following the traditional way and using the manual systems.

Better and Accurate Cash Forecasting – A typical collection system often fails when it comes to cash-forecasting but while you use collection management software, your team will be given the advantage of tracking the expected payments along with providing a statistical cash forecast. Companies can easily get details about the expected payments that can be further utilized for confirming the statistical cash forecast for more accurate cash flow management.

Increased fresh/unused credit lines – A collection management software is very useful in identifying unused or fresh credit lines and get details of the lower-risk customers. Once these customers are identified, you can help them in buying more products and services from your company. The receivable end of the collection management software helps in getting a holistic view of the complete accounts receivable process so that you can have a clear idea about how improved and systematic credit management is positively impacting the future sales of your company.

Become trusted receivable with better borrowing position – Every organization requires capital for better growth and future improvement. Having said that, it is not an easy job for many companies. When you choose to borrow money for capital improvement, banks thoroughly calculate and review your receivables to determine what amount of money can be provided to you and at what interest rate. The organizations that are using collection management software mostly have healthier accounts receivable and are considered qualified for larger amounts from the banks that too at minimal interest rate. A lower interest rate can help the companies in getting huge potential savings over the course of each loan.

Highly reduced bad debts – The organizations that use collection management software systems typically cut down bad debt by 15-25% as this software successfully identifies and resolves any disputes very quickly and prevents them from aging to the point where they’re uncollectable.

Better reporting and analysis – The use of collection management software makes it highly feasible for organizations to get better reports that are pre-configured, consists of labels, catalog, templates, checklists etc. CMS ensures that data can be easily exported in a variety of useful formats.

Acuiti Labs – SAP Consulting Firm

Acuiti Labs is an SAP silver partner with a specific focus on Lead to Cash processes including SAP Billing (BRIM) and SAP CX Sales Cloud. We are a consulting firm with proven expertise in delivering successful SAP Billing (BRIM) based transformations. With Big four consulting experience in delivering digital transformation programs using SAP and other enterprise applications, we also have strong open source technology capability to deliver projects end to end with AI, IoT, Big Data, Mobile & Cloud technologies.

Advantages of choosing Acuiti Labs

Supporting various clients in Postal, Utilities & Telcom in their Debt Transformation journeys

European & US Experience

• Team of consultants with Big Four consulting experience.

• Delivering solutions to US, EMEA clients

Full Range of Services

• Delivering in the new age of digital transformation by providing a wide range of business and technical capabilities.

Relationships and People

• Partnership with our clients and maintaining a strong relationship is of utmost importance to the firm. We always go the extra mile

Teams based in UK & India

• Creating value through a mix of cost effectiveness and exceptional talent pool by leveraging geographical advantages

Flexible Delivery Models

• Providing multiple options of engagement and resource mix to ensure exceptional quality whilst allowing clients to maintain control

Acuiti Labs – We are an advanced BRIM competency centre because we offer:

· BRIM Solution Architecture

· Subscription Order Management (SOM)

· Convergent Mediation

· Convergent invoicing and FICA

· Convergent Charging

· BRIM Technical, FIORI & Integration

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27 JulBusinessSAPStartupsTechnology

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) – How is it changing the future of Transportation?

Time is not so far when customer-centric options like self-driving cars, carpooling, people opting for greener options and choosing public transport, etc. will take over, and owning a car will be rare. This is what the future of transportation certainly looks like. The concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) makes it even more clear and certain.

In the past few years, a huge shift from using personally owned cars to choosing public transportation or using mobility as a service has been noticed. The current way of traveling from let us say point A to point B has changed and is transforming and shaping up the whole ecosystem of individual mobility. Not only will be the entire transportation industry will be affected by it, but other sectors including health care, energy, media, insurance etc. will have the impact. These industries should reevaluate and opt for more advanced solutions to create value in this emerging environment.

What is Mobility as a Service (MaaS)?

Mobility as a Service also commonly referred to as MaaS is a customer-centric platform for individuals to use as a mode of transportation. This is an on-demand, real-time platform which basically includes a different combination of transport methods like a car and bike sharing, taxis, and car rentals/leases, and it offers its customers everything that is essential for an effortless traveling experience. Right from the user’s travel plan to payments, all this is included in MaaS.

To choose this service, all you have to do is to take a subscription of the application and you will have the access to available vehicles like car, bike, any public transport pass for the chosen time period depending on your convenience. If we talk about further details, it has smart mobility options including various modes of transportation for the ecological and social benefit are also playing a huge role in reducing harmful emissions, cleaning the air pollution, and proving better road safety.

Benefits of Mobility as a Service?

New age service Maas offers various advantages including –

Effortless and smart route planning — Maas offers real-time route planning for the users. it helps them in planning their journeys which might require using multiple transport methods based on the route they choose, with the help of smart suggestions drawn from their particular preferences.
Personalisation for best user-experience – MaaS is known for being offered as a completely personalized service. This creates a unique bonding between the users and the transport service provider. With the help of big data, it provides two-way communication and frequent customer feedback because of which MaaS systems have become the greatest customer-focused transportation platform of today
Easy payment choices — There are various different methods through which the MaaS users can pay for transportation which includes phones, smartwatches, and bank cards, flexibly before or after their journey, or also on a subscription basis.

What were the typical city transport billing platform challenges?

Multiple Booking Platforms – Leading to difficulty in creating bundles, limited integrated view of the customer, poor adaptability to multiple business models and not easy to grow partner ecosystem
Revenue Leakage – Manual processes, no single view of the customer, no streamlined order to cash process, limited Automation of business processes, higher Days of Outstanding.
Customer Experience – Needs to be enhanced, consistence and contextual
Limited Scalability – Bundles as well as combining various billing stream will lead to a massive increase in transaction volumes as well as business rules complexity
Visibility – Limited visibility (for business) of customer booking various commute options

How MaaS -Mobility as a Service and SAP BRIM together can be a game-changer?

The digital economy has completely changed the way how customers use to buy and engaged in the same service earlier. The subscription-based model has opened several options for the customers thus making the complete process hassle-free.

The Digital Economy has enabled new services … and changed the way customers buy

Iteration is based on customer behavior that includes price per month, per use, volume tiers, minimum commits, freemium, per outcome, etc.

SAP BRIM – Advanced Billing Platform for City Transport

Account Registration
- Register customer account
- Add credit card details

Journey Planning (Purchase)
- Check routes and possible legs of the journey
- Buy rides/journeys in advance

Journey: Tap-In & Tap-Out
- Every journey start and end are recorded by NFC, Proximity Sensor Bluetooth devices using the phone
- Separate events are clubbed together to record the journeys for charging
- Digital Presentment

- Responsive and Integrated Reporting / Customer-Centric Statements and Forms
- The customer receives a statement on mail for monthly usage

PayG Payment –Fair Price Promise
- Flexible Billing/Invoicing and Payment process
- End of the day all PayG charges are collated and payment run deducted the total from Credit card Service Charging

- Flexible Business Logic for Services Charging
- If the ride is already purchased that entitlement is used otherwise the charge is calculated for Pay

How Acuiti Labs can help?

Acuiti Labs is transforming the travel industry via the use of SAP BRIM and excellent customer experience-driven mobile apps.

We have innovated the travel of an individual who is using their own vehicle or using public transport to make it account-based pay rather than individual transactions.

These apps and BRIM platforms are designed to operate in any country or city with minor changes. This will significantly accelerate the adoption of account and relationship-based travel.

Acuiti Labs is an SAP Silver Partner offering an accelerated implementation service for SAP BRIM, Subscription Billing, Entitlement management, and more. Our experience and competency in ‘mobility as a service’ market could provide a complete road map for the businesses that are looking for transformation and adoption of a new way of mobility. Our billing and other SAP Services can help you in changing the way you consume mobility by integrating all forms of transport, including local bicycle services, ride-hailing, car-sharing, and a lot more. Contact us for more details.

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02 JulBusinessSAPTechnology

Role of SAP Billing / SAP BRIM in Transforming Tolling Business

Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing / SAP BRIM Solutions – Tolling is generally an amount, or a fee paid to access any road, bridge, or tunnel and the revenue generated by this is utilized for maintenance, construction, and/or other such operations

Toll Business can be simply understood as a way to deal with transportation challenges and provides a positive impact on freight transport in several ways. The toll in many ways has been benefiting society without placing an excruciating financial burden on the entire transport system. The advantages the toll business offer include improved transport efficiency increased revenue for the public budget and reduced external costs of road vehicles.

There is numerous research that has time and again proved that tolls can positively impact transportation in several ways. Below are a few examples –

Improved Transport Efficiency – With the road tolls being introduced, empty headings have been seen to decline. Additionally, tolls are also helping in reducing the vehicle km required for transportation as trucks are improving loading rates because of the pricing pressure.
An affordable choice, without impacting consumers’ prices – In most of the industries the range of transportation cost is between 1% to 5% of the total production cost which is comparatively low, and the accumulated statistics will not show any significant effect.
Significant contributions to transport sector funding comes from the toll revenue – This is true that money that comes from toll revenue is one of the major sources of funding that the transport sector earns.

How Tolling business can help in reducing the worldwide challenge of traffic Congestion?

The increased number of vehicles on road is certainly the cause of massive traffic jams during peak hours in many parts of the world. Managing the traffic congestion problem on a high scale would not only be a sign of relief to the economies of various countries across the globe but, this would also be helpful for sustained productivity and competitiveness.

A report by the UK government suggests that congestion may cost the economy of England £22 B a year in lost time by 2015. The U.S Transportation Institute said in 2011 that the cost of congestion is more than $120 billion, nearly $820 for every commuter in the U.S. World’s record traffic jam in China, Hebei province, was 110 km long during 12 days in August 2010.

There are three main purposes of road pricing and tolling among these tolling is utilized to generate revenues. The other two important reasons include congestion or value pricing which helps in managing demand and environmental pricing to reduce environmental impacts.

E-Tolling System – What is E-tolling and what are its advantages:

E-tolling or Electronic tolling collection (ETC) is a wireless means of automatically collecting the usage fee or toll charges from the vehicles using toll roads, HOV lanes, toll bridges, and toll tunnels, etc. without requiring any action or stopping by the driver. This not only is time-saving but also keeps the entire process of toll collection transparent. Electronic tolling is also cheaper when compared to a staffed toll booth as it does not require manual processing and it helps in reducing transaction costs for both government and private road owners.

Advantages of E-Tolling –

No stopping of vehicles at a toll booth
Time-saving
The reduced traffic congestion problem
Can save gallons of gasoline every year
Efficient, safe, and secure

Evolution of Business Models and Non-toll Revenue. Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing –

Toll pricing models have been evolved the most in the past few years. With the evolution and several new innovations, it has become more complex with customers demanding loyalty benefits, discounts, and vouchers. Especially the customers who own a large number of vehicles, deal with a lot of such task forces, and have to take similar journeys several times.

Tolling charges vary depending on what time of the day the trip was taken. How many travelers are there in a car, total distance covered, or even customer’s residence? The payment itself could be prepaid (wallet based), postpaid (Bank settlement) or hybrid model. Also, taxes could depend on the type of vehicles to subsidize electrical vehicles.

Besides the pricing and billing complexities in Toll itself, tolling companies have a lot of avenues to grow the non-toll business and get additional revenue. The same vehicle cards which are being used for Toll could be used for paying for fuel, parking, E-vehicle charging, hiring bikes, and car wash services.

Challenges Faced by Tolling Business

Road transport accounts for around 16% of global man-made CO2 emissions. Also, the number of crashes subsequently increases due to congested roads.
Tolling business deals with a lot of administrative tasks and paperwork which becomes quite a headache if not managed with the help of proper dedicated solution
Juggling between too many transponders and navigating the customer service maze

Role of SAP BRIM Solution in Toll Collecting –

Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing is super easy with Acuiti Labs!

Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) solution under the hood comprises of various different solution components that are pre-integrated in a suite. The Customer, Products Master and Order, Contract Management is handled in the Subscription Order Management (SOM) component that allows new customers to register, along with their e-tag information. On the tolling plaza where the vehicle information is actually captured by tolling operational systems which will then pass that on to Convergent Mediation which allows data massaging and validation.

SAP BRIM Platform can orchestrate information to downstream systems or can couple separate events together like vehicle entry and exist events received from two different toll points on the same route. Convergent charging takes care of the complex rating and charging logic and find out whom to charge and how much to charge for the journey. Finally, Convergent Invoicing can handle billing, invoicing, and settlement processes with banks and postings to subledgers.

Tolling Systems – Open versus Closed

In the closed tolling system, the vehicle is tracked both at entry and exit points. While in the open system toll plazas or charging booths are charging points for the applicable road section.

Customer Journey

The customer journey begins right from the moment when he/she either purchases a card or e-tag from the store and registers it along with the vehicle registration details. Customers can then top-up their card/e-tag using banking services like bank mobile app or ATM. Now when the customer makes a toll-applicable journey, based on a closed or open toll system the toll plaza will record the details or his card/e-tag verifying them against the vehicle plate number to detect any fraud.

These details will then be fed through Convergent Mediation where there will be further validations like multiple journeys on the same path in very short amount of time or improbable time difference between entry and exit timestamps recorded. Once the event data is validated it is rated by the Charging system to create billing items (records) of transactions. These transaction records/items are aggregated to be shared with the customer and the bank for any applicable settlements later. To minimize credit exposure it may very well happen that the entry point registers the vehicle entry and reserves or block some amount on customers’ e-tag accounts and at the exit point the charges are calculated and the e-tag balance is either deducted immediately or send to the bank for settlements.

Advantages of Using SAP BRIM –

Simplified Customer interactions
Meeting real-time expectations
Real-time insight for true customer 360-degree view
Increase Transparency and efficiency
Real-time Execution for context-sensitive offerings
Improved Customer engagement
Innovative pricing and Bundles
Consolidated Billing to manage credit and collection efficiently
Handles hybrid payments

While now you already know what role SAP BRIM plays in managing toll business efficiently than ever, it also important to get a holistic view of some other advancements offered by SAP solutions to its customers and how Acuiti Labs could be the most suitable choice for you –

Business Responsiveness – SAP BRIM offers Innovative pricing model, charging and billing models and also opens up a smart revenue stream that are personalized for your B2B offerings and you get a chance to know your customers better and thus can offer customized solutions to them.

Efficient Revenue Management – SAP Solutions could be the best choice when you are looking forward to increasing customer satisfaction and improve financial performance with a converged view of a customer account, receivables, payables, and disputes.

The flexibility of Deployment – Get the flexibility of deploying complete, integrated customer care and next-gen billing system with SAP Billing Solutions or choose to deploy in smaller implantable steps for targeted incremental value. You get the freedom of doing it the way you wish to choose!

How Acuiti Labs can be the right digital partner for the transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing?

Acuiti Labs’ can help in the transformation of the tolling business with SAP Billing solution and efficiently handles the issues that toll businesses are currently facing. We can manage the toll Industry pain points and also support potential future growth avenues. Contact us for the digital transformation of your tolling industry today!

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26 JunBusinessSAPTechnology

Transformation of Media and Entertainment Industry using SAP BRIM Solution

What is the need of SAP BRIM Solution for the Media and entertainment industry today? This industry has evolved rapidly over the past few years and has become the early adopters of technology. The evolution of the industry has led to a more subscription-based economy with a healthy dose of usage-based charging. Easy and flexible options to watch movies or their favorite shows which is now at their fingertip with the online streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, Hotstar, and the list goes on. The need to modernize and adopt a digital transformation-based approach has become imperative for the industry old timers to match with the new technology based streaming platforms.

Releasing movies on the conventional theaters and cinema houses is now being challenged by the new streaming platforms. There is a big shift in the revenue model for movie makers. More and more movie makers and studios are now releasing content directly on the streaming platforms making the traditional model close to obsolete. Along with this the consumer expectations have changed considerably. They are now looking at pure subscription of their desired bundles or pay per use or a combination of the two. They are no longer willing to be tied to the conventional media content delivery, where the choice was driven by the media service providers.

Imperatives of Media and Entertainment World today –

Consumers of media are now the millennials whose expectations are completely different from yester years. The viewing habits and demands are very technology driven. It is very important to understand that the combination of new digital distribution modalities and evolution of customer’s consumption habits. This is continuously challenging the traditional Media and Entertainment business model. It has already been considered the start of a sweeping transformation that will continue to reshape the entire Media and Entertainment ecosystem.

We cannot ignore the unyielding competition as far as the media and entertainment industry is concerned, with even the biggest of industry players battling for the eyeballs of the viewers and subscribers. The media companies that will rapidly identify and react to the evolving requirements and consumption patterns of the end-users will survive in this rate race.

The rapid growth in advanced technologies has been the single biggest factor behind this resurgence. The same advancement in technologies has also created the commonly witnessed enlightening shifts. The audience now have understood their power and have become more demanding. Gone is the time when they use to adjust their daily routine, to the availability or airing of the content. Content providers are wrapping up their broadcasting and publishing as per the requirement and convenience of the customers. With the growing completion amongst the streaming platforms, the companies have become more customer-centric over time.

When at any given point people can exchange notes with each other about any of the newly launch media content by the means of several social media websites like YouTube or Instagram or review sites, the death or survival of any published or broadcast content can be decided in seconds.

One thing is obvious; consumers are more liberal and are keen to exercise greater choices and express personal freedoms as far as media & entertainment are concerned. Along with independence, consumption has also significantly gone up. This has led to a double-edged challenge for the content providers, greater opportunities, and much higher risks. In the era of technology shifts, it is imperative that only those media and entertainment entities that enable themselves rapidly, identify and act on this tectonic shift in the consumer mindset will survive and indeed thrive.

In summary, challenges faced by Media and Entertainment Industry –

Knowing the fact that the media and entertainment industry is witnessing massive transformation at the moment, it is also reacting by working towards improving the customer experience. Nevertheless, here are some major challenges that are being faced by this industry.
1. Higher Customer Expectations – The customers are expecting the various media and entertainment providers to deliver choice, convenience, and value, all these wrapped inside personalized and customized experiences that should be available on-demand and on a cross-platform basis which should also include limited advertising and strong data protection.

2. Adaption of new realities – Growing competition for viewers and advertisers, combined with ongoing declines in subscribers, has become quite a cause for topline media and entertainment business owners to relook at the new realities and adapt them for being all-time better. All that Media and Entertainment industry requires is a new level of operational superiority — the kind of strategic expense reduction that provides short-term results and long-term efficiencies.

3. Constant desire of customers for something new and unique – Speaking about the traditional Media and Entertainment model, creativity, distribution, and monetization were direct. It was common for consumers to be passive and wait for content that was made available at a time prescribed by others. Digitalization has changed the face of the world and that has reduced the need of an intermediary, that is more atomized, yet a bit complex and, above all, lively. As mentioned earlier, Media and Entertainment consumers are more inspired and demanding. Their expectations are rather high on being able to control how the content, products or services should be delivered to them. This behavior and expectations have been fueled by personalized experiences across their daily life, right from mobility and financial services to communications and indeed entertainment.

4. Mitigation of Cyber risks – Huge amount of data is being created every minute as a result of millions of clicks, views, and downloads. This data offers media and entertainment companies a real competitive advantage, however, this same data is a real threat for them as it acts as a magnet for cybercriminals. Companies need to have a better plan in place in order to deal with any cybersecurity issue.

5. Race to deliver the best content – The rapid growth in video creation and distribution platforms and a consistent rise in engagement metrics, subscription fees, advertising revenue or a combination of all of these together have created an intensely competitive landscape for developing and acquiring the best content.

With so much content available across many distribution alternatives, Media and entertainment businesses are forced to think of innovative strategies to deliver more compelling programs for their consumers to watch. AI and machine learning technologies can be leveraged by these companies to dissect viewing patterns from multiple perspectives to build personalized recommendations into consumers’ digital interaction.

Role of SAP in changing the face of Media and Entertainment Industry

The content offered by media and entertainment industry plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction, SAP S/4 HANA and the cloud platform can help in streamlining and personalizing the content as per the taste of the Audience. SAP S/4 HANA has collaborated with SAP Cloud Platform and is facilitating the media houses to digitize and innovate their business models.

Here are a few points that can help in understanding the role of SAP in media and entertainment industries –

Creating New Cloud-Based Multipurpose Applications

The SAP Cloud based platform is helping media companies to build new cloud-based mobile applications rapidly which can in turn help them for the next-generation audience, that are more technology driven and are always hooked online through their mobile devices.

Bundling

Many new media companies are opting for bundling service offered by SAP. Product bundling feature enables them to easily create complex and personalized product offerings of digital goods and services for their customers. With the help of this feature you can also offer flexible pricing and availability rules based on the customer selection

Packaging

In this competitive world of new digital a reality, SAP S/4HANA can help your deal with all packaging requirements efficiently.

Monthly Subscription Billing

SAP Subscription Billing solution can help your business with a simplified, automated approach to billing and ordering processes to help you create and monetize new offers quickly and effectively which can also be chosen on the Subscription basis.

Customer Experience

SAP Billing Services can help your company in delivering better customer experience by providing transparency and flexible billing choices. It can help you in managing huge number of users with ease and also keep a track of user-based charging.

SAP innovative software solutions remain the game changer when it comes to targeting the right audience, dealing with customer problems, establishing better connections with them, and a lot more.

Speaking about the facts, as per SAP’s official website, near about 83% of the media-based companies listed in Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers, 74 % of radio and TV broadcasting content worldwide is produced by SAP customers and 90 % of the printers and publishers in the Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers.

SAP’s easy approach to solve to your specific your specific media business requirements –

SAP’s intelligent technologies optimizes the overall experience of your customers. Move a step ahead by increasing the transparency of end-to-end processes and leverage real-world awareness which involves consumers, talent, and also business to business (B2B) partners get more innovative.

SAP innovative solutions can help you in unlocking business values and potential with digital technology. Get an all new approach to content delivery by connecting innovative technologies with integrated business solutions and get more closer to creating an intelligent enterprise

SAP CX to improve Customer Experience –

With a lot of new options coming up in the market so promptly, it is quite a task for businesses to win customer’s trust and keep it intact in the long run. These fascinating options for the customers are capable enough to drag their complete focus away from you. SAP Customer Experience is one of the best solutions to make each step of your customers journey count. Understand their intentions, interact frequently to show that you care, offer them complete support at each step of their journey. This is how SAP helps you in providing the best of customer service.

SAP BRIM Solution to improve customer experience – Example of the Use-case

The role of SAP BRIM solution for the media and entertainment industry can be clearly understood with the help of an example of the use-case where the primary requirement was to improve the customer experience.

Business challenges –

In this use case, the media and entertainment industry wanted a system to deal with:

Product bundling and pricing,
Manage subscriptions
Manage offers efficiently
Single billing for subscription and consumption events

They required a provision that can offer the customers bundled product with a lot of unique options for them and a robust OTC process that includes quotation approval.

What SAP Innovative solutions were used to deal with the above-mentioned challenges –

SAP BRIM Solutions can significantly reduce manual efforts and operational cost by offering support for businesses that deal with subscription models. A few SAP BRIM solutions that are involved in this process includes SAP CX C4C, Commerce, Data Mediation, SAP BRIM and Subscription Billing.

Depending on your business goals, SAP BRIM solutions are implemented which helps the businesses understand the scenario of getting numerous advantages for both customers and business itself.

SAP BRIM Solution Architecture for Media and Entertainment Industry

Benefits

After implementing SAP BRIM solution, the end user was provided with a highly scalable and high-performance SAP CX Integrated solution along with a 360° view of customer records to accelerate collections processes and improve customer service. The business also gets the benefit of provision of performing usage and recurring based billing.

How Acuiti Labs can help –

Acuiti Labs is a UK based SAP Silver Partner and offers innovate solutions like BRIM, Subscription Billing, CPQ, C4C and more. Business growth or improving customer relationships, we can help you with customized solutions for all your requirements. We can help you in accelerating implementation time, reducing risks, reducing manual processes, enhancing sales activities, improved customer interactions and moreover, get you ready for your digital journey with our SAP based solutions.

284

26 FebSAP

Looking for a comprehensive Sales Performance Management System? How can SAP Commissions help?

SAP Commissions is a simple yet very effective way to improve and align sales performance management according to your business goals. Already chosen by many successful businesses, this is a new age end-to-end solution to deal with business requirements and helps in streamlining incentive compensation management, distribution process, approvals, and workflow, it also helps in reducing overhead and maximising plan effectiveness.

Grow revenue, meet business goals and keep your sales team motivated with SAP Commissions. This innovative solution allows you to create, optimize and deliver incentive compensation plans and align sale behaviors to maximise profits while gaining the transparency to increase commissions ROI and remove errors. No matter you are dealing with direct sales force or indirect sales force, this solution can easily manage a complete incentive compensation process for you right from sales order to payment.

SAP Commissions is designed in a way that it fits perfectly into your business process and brings in the agility to meet the rapidly changing market scenario. While using this for your business you can eliminate the commission errors, align sales to your business goals, and monitor your expenses wisely that are specifically assigned for compensation budget.

If you are also looking for a simple way to deliver transparent incentives in an agile manner and get your sales team fully aligned with your business goals, SAP Commissions is for you! Powerful and fully customisable dashboards and prepackaged reports with SAP Commissions make sales performance management process even faster, accurate, and transparent.

SAP Sales Performance Management with SAP commissions

Below are the key features that will help you understand how Sales performance management can be best done along with SAP Commissions:

1. Execute your Sales Plan in a better way

This is the best way to align all your compensation plans in one place which is also a great advantage for sales representatives and sales managers. SAP Commissions comes with complete transparency and allows the sales reps to have visibility about the payouts and performances, in a way that they can have a proper understanding about commission plans and raise compensation disputes, see detailed compensation statements and performance metrics and forecast income at their convenience, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

2. Easy integration with the back-end systems

Best part about using SAP commissions for sales performance management is that it can easily be integrated with major and most frequently used latest platforms like CRM, ERP, HR systems etc. where the integration can be done both at data level and at the processing level. So, you can easily enjoy the real-time data insights and have the flexibility to execute business processes across different systems without worrying about worrying about logging manually, every time.

3. Ease of one-click Traceability

This solution comes with complete audit trail visibility & traceability for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance. Get complete details of audit logs on each of the available screens as information is tracked from time to time and it has all the records about which changes are done, who did the changes and when these changes are done. Sales reps can easily trace any payout amount back to the originating sales transaction just with the ease of one-click traceability.

4. Precise and Built-in Crediting

SAP Commissions allows you to easily and precisely process any complex split; so that any number of direct or indirect payees, that could be across internal and external hierarchies can be credited with being delayed.

This is a robust built-in crediting engine, that you can credit over complex roles, relationships, and numerous functions with the help of simple drag-and-drop actions.

5. Quick Settlements of Compensation Disputes

Every business understands the pain of resolving compensation disputes as the process is not only time consuming, but also can also have a lot of errors to be resolved. SAP Commissions can be very helpful in resolving the compensation disputes quickly and precisely. This not only reduces the number of errors and disputes a business might have to deal with but also simply and smartly deals with disputes as and when they occur.

Who should opt for SAP Commissions?

Businesses that are looking forward to enhancing their sales performance management can opt for SAP Commissions. Visit our SAP Commissions page and learn more about this solution. Also, get in touch to have a brief understanding of SAP Consulting Services that we offer.

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18 FebSAP

Data Protection Regulations – How SAP Marketing Cloud can help Marketers?

In the era of ubiquitous computing where even your home appliances can contact the service centers and open a maintenance request on your behalf, data of all sorts is getting generated in gargantuan proportions. This might sound like a boon to businesses and marketers as it provides a lot of data and information to be fed into analytics engines and generate valuable insights into most sought after KPIs like customer behavior and loyalty management. However, this boon also comes with significant responsibilities for maintaining the sanctity and privacy of this data which might be personally identifiable information of your customers as well as employees. In the wrong hands it can prove to be very damaging for the customers and in turn to the reputation of the companies who store such data. Regulators and governments have also identified the importance and the risks of such data leaks. Be it instances of customers of financial institutions losing huge amounts or alleged attempts of social engineering, are everyday news.

In such a scenario, the regulations that were created in the past like the Data Protection Directive of 1995 from the European union was created before companies like Google and Facebook came into existence. Law makers and governments soon recognized the fact and brought in new laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as recently as May 2018. If we specifically look at the GDPR, there are some significant enhancements over its predecessor, which includes but is not limited to:Transparency of data collection and utilization.

Transparency of data collection and utilization.
Easy access for an individual to their data and the right to be forgotten.
Audit trail to identify how and when a consent was given by an individual.
Mandatory breach notification.
Independent role of a Data Protection Officer for companies above a certain threshold size and that process personal data.
Consent of parents for processing a minor’s data

There are hefty fines to the tunes of millions or a significant fraction of a business’s turnover in case it fails to adhere to these provisions. These provisions help to enhance the data protection levels but also increases the challenges for businesses and their marketing teams. In such a scenario the responsibility of the data management and marketing tools increases manifolds.

How SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud address these challenges and help marketers?

As the name suggests, SAP C/4 HANA Marketing cloud is referred to as the fourth generation CX product from SAP and incorporates multiple tools and techniques to address the regulatory challenges. Let’s take a look at some of the important features that make SAP Marketing Cloud one the most attractive solution in regards to resolving above mentioned challenges:

1. Marketing Permissions Settings: The permissions settings control whether explicit permission of the contact/individual is required or an implicit permission can be assumed unless the contact opts out of the marketing communications. These permissions can also determine how much and what data can be stored from inbound channels of marketing communication including social media channels. These permission settings are based on the communication direction, country and the communication media used. However, there is a caveat here, these permission settings will be overridden by the explicit opt in/out by the contact/customer. Any unspecific setting is overridden by a specific one. Importantly these explicit permissions can also be imported via CSV uploads or OData services.

Below are the 2 types based on the communication direction:

A. Inbound Marketing Permission settings – These settings allow the business to decide how they listen to the customer data on various communication mediums and the country to which the individual belongs. Below screenshot shows the setting details.

Depending on the country, the communication media used for the inbound communication the permission can be set.

No value in the permission fields means ‘No Restrictions’ on storing data.
‘1’ means contact interaction details can be stored but not the personally identifiable data. This disables any engagement possibilities with the contact but the interaction data can be used for analytics purpose.
‘2’ indicates the data cannot be stored in any form at all and has to be discarded.

Below flowchart illustration will further clarify the concept:

B. Outbound Marketing Permissions – These settings allow businesses to validate if an explicit opt-in is required to send marketing communication based on country and communication media. Below screenshot shows the setting details. If ‘type of consent’ is selected as ‘E’ it means explicit opt in is required and ‘I’ implies that implicit permission can be assumed to send communication.

2. Subscriptions: Subscriptions allow marketers to store data related to the interests of a contact. A contact/customer can subscribe to newsletters, etc. and receive communication from the company.
3. Contact Profile – Permission Marketing Tab: One of the very important point in most of the data regulations is transparency of data collection and audit trail of how and when consent was given. This has been achieved by providing visibility to marketers on the Permission Marketing tab where they can view all the marketing permissions given by the contact/customer as well as all the subscriptions data.

Marketers can see if the opt-in was given explicitly or implicitly assumed by switching to the table view in this screen. As seen in the screenshot, the human figure on the opt-in illustrates that its explicit.

4. Double Opt-ins: Double opt-in can be enabled to send confirmation emails to a contact/customer when they sign up or sign out of a newsletter/subscription. It can be of two types viz. email opt-in or opt-out and newsletter opt-in or opt-out. Email formats with confirmation links can be created in the in-built content studio. Double opt-ins make the process of gathering and storing data more transparent.
5. Global Suppression Rules: By defining these rules, marketers can exclude contacts from communications based on contact’s previous interactions or campaign data. Contacts get excluded from campaign execution if they meet the criteria defined in the suppression rules.
6. Communication Category Limit: This feature defined in the communication category setup helps the marketers set limit on the number of times a contact is communicated in a given period of type using that communication media.

Summary

Now that we have seen all the components of the marketing permission and opt-ins individually it’s time to summarize and see how these fit in and work together. We will also see where do these features fit into the marketing cycle. Below process flow gives a better idea.

All the enumerated features and their seamless integration makes SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud an ideal option for organizations to manage their end to end marketing needs. In conclusion, I believe, data regulations are going to be more stringent in coming times as newer and advanced threats emerge but with a robust and exhaustive solution like SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud will prove to be a marketer’s first choice.

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29 JanBusinessSAP

SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM: Why this is a better idea for your business?

SAP CPQ is one of the best sales configuration systems that any business can use to ease the complexity of selling solutions that feature multifaced combinations. Choosing CPQ can streamline and automate the selling process so that you deliver a solution that perfectly matches the requirement of your customers.

SAP CPQ is designed with a purpose that can help users to automate and accelerate the sales cycle. While combining products, there is a possibility that you might have to deal with product combination complexities. Simplify this entire process with the help of robust configuration tools that SAP CPQ provides and give your user the advantage of defining component requirements, analyzing functional specification, combing various solution components, and settling interdependencies.

Why CPQ and CLM could be better together?

Enhanced sales, better customer experience, quick processing of deals and minimised errors, these are a few basics required by a sales team in any big or small business. CPQ is the most trusted and efficient system to deal with sales-related problems and provide quick and accurate quotes to the customers with the help of which error-prone and time-consuming processes of sifting through multiple spreadsheets can be avoided.
Automating the complete sales process, including the contract, is another added advantage when it comes to improving the sales cycle. The pace of business is growing faster than ever and businesses in this situation cannot afford to experience any kind of delay in deal/contract finalization. And here’s when CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) makes your task easy and provides complete surety to the sales reps so that they do not face any difficulty during the legal steps’ finalization.
There are a lot of companies today that have already realised the importance of Contract Lifecycle Management for the business growth and moreover has understood that it is not just record-keeping system but CLM Software’s combination with CPQ system can be the best choice to get you one step closer to your revenue goals
Here are 5 major reasons that show why SAP CPQ integration with CLM is a good idea for businesses today –

1. Helps in Closing Contracts/Deals faster

The complicated manual process of contract finalization demands the sales team to wrap up the legal formalities which indeed are time-consuming and also carry the risk of losing the deal as the customers can lose patience and step back due to frustration.
While at the same time, the automated process guarantees a smooth and quick deal processing where sales reps have the freedom to:

Easily create contracts with the help of self-service wizards and templates.
Import third-party contracts.
Get the advantage of automated approval escalation.
Negotiate contracts with the help of pre-approved clause library.
Get a collaborative workspace that enables real-time tracking of all redlines plus version control

The reason why a CLM solution streamlines and speeds up the contract process is its parallel cloud presence that gives the flexibility of contract reviewing to multiple approvers at the same time.

2. Enhances Sales Experience

The Sales reps, instead of focusing more and more on the selling process, are required to indulge in the manual process of preparing proposals and contracts for customers. This affects the overall sales of the organization and also demotivates the sales team. Using CLM and CPQ together enhances the sales experience by allowing the reps to speed the entire process from the quote to closing the deal with a signed contract. It gives reps a streamlined and easier way to interact with legal teams and the deal desk. They can focus on selling and driving more revenue.

3. Generate for revenue by never missing renewals

The combination of CPQ and CLM is very helpful for the sales reps as through it they can receive email notifications of contract milestones, renewals, expiration dates, etc. well in advance. You will not need any extra process for the renewals as with this combination all the required information remains at the fingertips and can be easily processed whenever the contract is requiring renewal. This facilitates the sales reps to:

To take action ensuring contracts are renewed correctly
Follow-ups on upsell suggestions are provided by an AI-enabled CPQ

All this process saves a lot of time and manual efforts which in turn generates more revenue for the business.

4. Boost the overall productivity of your business

Reaching your revenue goals and increasing the productivity of your business is a lot easier with the combination of CPQ and CLM. The SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM not only simplifies the sales process, but it is also helpful in minimizing the total amount of time that a legal team might take to wrap the entire contract process.
Store all your contracts in a single online repository with the help of which you can have complete visibility and version control to keep a track of each step. You won’t require different applications for different processes like contract creation, negotiation, renewal, etc. and all this can be done with the combination of CPQ and CLM.

5. Offer Better Customer Experience

Deliver optimal customer expertise by providing accurate and quick services with this advanced combination of SAP CPQ and CLM. Avoid any misunderstandings that might occur when working without an automated tool and speed up the entire process by opting for this new online platform. Do not let small manual mistakes and confusions ruin your reputation in front of your valuable customers. When you choose SAP CPQ integration with CLM, you not only choose it for offering the perfect and accurate quote to your customer but also give them the flexibility of being updated with the complete contract processing through this advanced and straightforward integrated system offered by SAP.

Apart from CPQ, CLM can be integrated with –

SAP C4C

The combination of C4C with CLM allows businesses to manage contracts and quote negotiations more efficiently! This happens because a new CLM tab is added to C4C just after the integration is done thus giving the users the privilege of switching between both the applications (CLM and C4C) without having to log in again and again. Other settings such as Contract status check and permissions etc. are configured in CLM just the way it is done in CPQ.

Salesforce

CLM’s integration with Salesforce can help businesses in leveraging CRM data in making informed decisions and managing contract negotiations efficiently. While using this combination, your sales team can easily manage all the related activities through a single dedicated platform thus simplifying the entire workflow for them.

Netsuite

while used along CLM, Netsuite can help users in utilising the guided selling capabilities that are provided by the ERP solution. This integration is also most helpful in streamlining the entire contract management process for the businesses.

DocuSign

CLM and DocuSign integration cut downs the unnecessary costs that you might be spending on printing, scanning, and copying paper documents and enables a completely electronic workflow. This automated system collects information, and sign contracts online with electronic devices like your computer or mobile phone and speeds up the process.

Adobe Sign

Speed up the workflow, manage contracts efficiently, offer clear and full reporting compliance by integrating CLM with Adobe Sign. This combination allows businesses to securely automate workflows and sign contracts online electronic devices like computers, laptop or mobile phones. As an administrator, you can integrate and set up Adobe Sign with CLM and add the e-signature capability by signing an agreement.

How Acuiti Labs can be your best choice for integrating CPQ with CLM?

Acuiti Labs is an UK based SAP Silver partner with expertise in SAP’s latest technologies including Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Cloud for Customer (C4C), Contract Life-cycle Management (CLM), SAP Billing (BRIM), SAP Subscription Billing, and more. We have already deployed several SAP solutions successfully with Global Clientele and have also created a system with the help which you can easily go for SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM.

Contact us to get more details about how Acuiti Labs can be your best partner in getting CPQ integrated with CLM and making your businesses process a lot more seamless and quicker.

234

03 DecSAP

All that you need to learn about SAP S/4HANA and its deployment options

SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s next-generation business suite which is specially designed to run on SAP HANA. S/4HANA was launched in February 2015 and is the fourth business suite version that came after SAP R/3. It is the only unique business suit that is compatible with SAP HANA system at its backend and just because of this unique feature, SAP has replaced the old SAP ECC/ERP system with SAP HANA. Still, S/4 HANA is based around its successor i.e. ECC (ERP Control Center) solution and considers it as its core technology. SAP S/4 HANA can also be known as the latest Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution with following special features.

Streamlined data
Easy to understand tool designing
Agile and easy to use
Capable of performing complex calculations
Capable of handling huge data
On-premise or on-cloud deployment
Can also be deployed as a hybrid system

S/4 HANA is super-fast when it comes to the retrieval and processing of data in real-time. This is because it doesn’t support batch processing for its data and follows the smarter method. As it works on real-time analytics, you can use it to process and analyse information from the Internet of Things (IoT) or big data sources.

It is very important to understand that SAP S/4HANA has played an essential role in the digital transformation of many businesses that are also SAP customers. This post will help you in understanding that why the SAP HANA Cloud Platform is similarly essential for organisations who have not yet taken-up a cloud strategy.

Next Generation, Real-time ERP Business Suite – SAP S/4HANA

Are you ready to transform your business with SAP S/4HANA which is today ‘s most advanced real-time ERP business suite? With SAP S/4 HANA you can change your organisation’s digital transformation challenges into brand-new opportunities. It allows you to be more flexible for trying out new business models, speeds up the development process, and facilitates collaboration. And thanks to core SAP HANA database with the help of which SAP S/4HANA enables real-time analytics and is able support quick decision making.

We are all aware of the pace with which the industry is growing and this has subsequently increased the demands on ERP systems. There is huge competition and to stay ahead speed, agility, and the ability to innovate has become a must. SAP S/4HANA is an SAP’s perfect innovation to deal with all such needs. This is undoubtedly a next-generation business suite to form the digital core of a modern business by blending connected business processes with a single source of truth and an instinctive user experience.

Streamline and Modernize your Business with SAP S/4HANA –

Take actions and plan in real time: SAP HANA Database is all that you need to enable plan and take actions in real time and if you use this you will no longer need batch processing.
Flexibility to adapt business models: Be connected with people, necessary devices and also business networks, so that you can flexibly adapt your business models as per the changing market conditions and latest trends.
Improve the decision-making ability:On the basis of reliable data provided through a single source of truth, the informed decision making is improved. Leverage predictive analytics & also what-if analyses that can be of great help to optimize your planning processes.
Boost productivity:Flexible user interface, clear and personalized dashboards to represent business insights and role-based interfaces boosts the user productivity and at the same time minimizes the requirement of training sessions.

SAP HANA Deployment options – Choose from them wisely

First and the most important aspect of choosing the right deployment option is to thoroughly understand the business requirement and then you can quickly and seamlessly go ahead choosing the appropriate deployment option that not only fits into your business requirement but also falls within the budget.

Depending on your budget and need, SAP S/4 HANA’s deployment options can be distributed into following major categories –

1. Public Cloud – When you choose cloud as a deployment option for your business, your deployment is managed in an SAP data center. All you need to do is to just pay a certain amount to the service provider and everything will be managed by them. As SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a common platform, you will have reduced control over it, and you cannot customise it. However, the positive part of choosing SAP S/4HANA Cloud deployment option is that, you will be always have the benefits of your using latest and updated features as Cloud deployment option automatically updates on a quarterly basis.
2. On-Premise – Have full control on the environment by choosing on-premise deployment option. Here, all you have to do is to buy SAP S/4HANA, install it and then run it way you want. Customize it to use it as per your requirements. But with privileges, there comes a few responsibilities too. While you go for this option you have to be responsible for maintaining and taking care of any upgrades and updates. You also have to take the agreement for the annual innovation cycle that provides you with the option of upgrading and updating once in a year.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – This is considered as the most basic form of cloud computing service. Choosing this deployment option can be easily explained with an example of renting a car. While you rent a car, you get similar services as you get when you own a car apart from taking care of hardware material and maintenance of the vehicle. So, with IaaS you will not have to worry about maintenance as it also works as a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model and mostly hosted through a hyperscale cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. However, while you avoid the high preliminary expenses of buying the technology, IaaS actually doesn’t always work out as the most cost-effective option.
4. Private Cloud – One of the best SAP S/4HANA deployment option to choose for your business is the private cloud. This is delivered in the form of managed service. Its’s like you own the cloud but the trained technology experts perform the activities for you. When you select private cloud deployment you get the privilege of merging the advantages of on-premise deployment with those of the cloud. So, a few benefits of using private cloud includes –

Quick innovation
Latest capabilities and features
greater flexibility
lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
Release management
24/7 Consultation option
On-time optimisation services

All the four deployment options explained above have their own importance, but it is you who have to decide what suits your business reequipment better. We at Acuiti Labs can guide you through the process of choosing most appropriate deployment option and can also help you with one. We are UK based SAP Silver Partner and are also certified SAP hosting and cloud services partner. We offer both On-Premise and Cloud Edition for SAP S/4HANA, through which you get complete flexibility to choose system and service package combinations.
This specialty allows you to scale in two dimensions:

Database size
Service level

And these added scalability options allow you to change your SAP S/4HANA deployment based on the changing requirements.
Contact us for more information about our SAP S/4HANA deployment options and other SAP services and solutions.

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_gid	1 day	Google Analytics sets this cookie to store information on how visitors use a website while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the collected data includes the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.
_hjSession_*	1 hour	Hotjar is a behaviour insights tool which we use to help us understand what visitors to our site do and why. Hotjar sets this cookie to ensure data from subsequent visits to the our site are attributed to the same user ID (which persists in the Hotjar User ID, which is unique to that site)
_hjSessionUser_*	1 year	Hotjar sets this cookie to ensure data from subsequent visits to oursite are attributed to the same user ID (which persists in the Hotjar User ID, which is unique to that site).
_hjTLDTest	session	Aiming to identify the predominant cookie path to utilize instead of the site's hostname. This approach ensures that cookies, if applicable, can be shared across subdomains.
_lfa	1 year	This cookie is set by the provider Leadfeeder to identify the IP address of devices used for visiting the website, for marketing purposes.
663a60c55d	session	Zoho sets this cookie is used to build a sales analytics cookie
AnalyticsSyncHistory	1 month	LinkedIn uses this cookie to retain information regarding the timing of a synchronization with the lms_analytics cookie.
ga_	1 year	Google Analytics sets this cookie to calculate visitor, session and campaign data and track site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognise unique visitors.
siqlsdb	never	Zoho sets this cookie to generate a unique ID for the session. This allows the website to obtain data on visitor behaviour for statistical purposes.
utsdb	never	Zoho SalesIQ sets this cookie to register data on visitor's website behaviour.

Cookie	Duration	Description
bcookie	1 year	LinkedIn sets this cookie from LinkedIn share buttons and ad tags to recognize browser IDs.
bscookie	1 year	LinkedIn sets this cookie to store performed actions on the website.
li_sugr	3 months	LinkedIn sets this cookie to collect user behaviour data to optimise the website and make advertisements on the website more relevant.
test_cookie	15 minutes	doubleclick.net sets this cookie to determine if the user's browser supports cookies.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	6 months	YouTube sets this cookie to measure bandwidth, determining whether the user gets the new or old player interface.
VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA	6 months	YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's cookie consent state for the current domain.
YSC	session	Youtube sets this cookie to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages.
yt-remote-connected-devices	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos.
yt-remote-device-id	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos.
yt.innertube::nextId	never	YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
yt.innertube::requests	never	YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_zcsr_tmp	session	Zoho sets this cookie for the login function on the website.
li_gc	6 months	Linkedin set this cookie for storing visitor's consent regarding using cookies for non-essential purposes.
lidc	1 day	LinkedIn sets the lidc cookie to facilitate data center selection.
uesign	1 month	Zoho sets this cookie for the Visitor Live Chat.
UserMatchHistory	1 month	LinkedIn sets this cookie for LinkedIn Ads ID syncing.
wp-wpml_current_language	session	WordPress multilingual plugin sets this cookie to store the current language/language settings.

Cookie	Duration	Description
alr	1 hour	Glassdoor sets this cookie to track which users have shown interest in which job postings. The cookie ensures that the most relevant job postings are shown to the specific user.
AWSALB	7 days	AWSALB is an application load balancer cookie set by Amazon Web Services to map the session to the target. Load balancing is the technical means by which we ensure that our site continues to run smoothly even if a large volume of people are visiting it at the same time.